Let the Locavory Begin

I've mentioned this to several people now. But I'd yet to make a public commitment. Here goes:

My daughter and I are “eating local” (with a couple exceptions), for a year, starting June 3 with the opening of the first of two local farmer’s markets.

In this, as many will recognize, we are inspired by Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful and immensely popular Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which I also raved about here.

It’s also the case that, as my shopping habits have changed over the past few years, I have naturally increased my use of local products. The majority of my vegetables this year have come from a farm called Gallatin Valley Botanical, where I have a CSA share; I ate them fresh during the summer, and froze some for winter (I’m still eating them now, at the end of February). My bread and flour, and my milk and cream and eggs and butter, have long come from local or regional producers. I don’t buy much meat, but we have excellent local beef, buffalo, and other meats in Montana, and I try to choose grassfed products from nearby ranches. In various seasons, I can and do get local apples, dried beans, vegetable oil, honey, and other products.

But I’ve always approached food shopping with list in hand, the question of what do I need/want? having been considered ahead of time, and the choice amounting to which version to purchase (local? organic? cheapest? etc.). Because, in our American market environment (with the exception of certain “food desert” areas), everything on the list is virtually certain to be available. Years ago, when I did a lot of exotic cooking, yet thought little of seasonality or food transportation distance, I’d be flummoxed on the rare occasion when some fresh produce item demanded in a recipe was not to be found in any of my several nearby supermarkets. It was scandalous, because anomalous, when nobody happened to have lemongrass, or Belgian endive.

The real problem, as Kingsolver and others have made clear, is not that it is difficult to adequately feed oneself on mostly local products. The challenge is to change one’s mental habits so that one embraces the food available, then figures out how to best and most deliciously use it. This requires abandoning the idea, I think, pushed by many American personal-budget gurus, that meal planning must come before shopping. When endeavoring to eat locally, we need to take an approach that should come more naturally to us as a formerly foraging species: go out and gather what there is, whether from our own garden, a nearby farm, or a market. If we live in an area with a cold season, then we have to gather more than we immediately need; avoiding waste means preserving the excess, not shopping according to a rigorous plan.

After all, which gives me more joy? Buying a jar of spaghetti sauce, a bag of pasta, and a pie slice of parmesan cheese in preparation for a dinner when we will surely have spaghetti (again)? Or receiving those unsolicited boxes of tomatoes, or root vegetables, or apples, that our elderly neighbors used to leave on our doorstep, overflow from their productive back yard, and musing over “how to use them up”? Even leaving aside all questions of sustainability, the first task is simple, carefully-delineated, impersonal, and more or less the same from week to week; the second is creative, complex, invokes a neighborly relationship, and never failed to give me a feeling of abundance and satisfaction. Potatoes, carrots or apples, yes, I did always have a use for them.

I am positively looking forward to what feels almost like a luxury: instead of budgeting some precise weekly amount for food, if I find something wonderful at the farmer’s market, I will buy it. (Maybe a lot of it, because we only get fresh foods, here in Montana, from about June to October.) I will give myself leave to explore the really good stuff that’s out there, instead of always maintaining a carefully balanced larder of peanut butter and breakfast cereal and salsa and rice and frozen juice concentrate and spaghetti sauce. I will enthusiastically take my friend up on her offer of sharing her yard’s yield of apples and rhubarb and raspberries, in exchange for picking labor and some vacation garden-watering. (Fruit is a northern-climate luxury: YES, I’m interested.)

I bet I’ll eat better than I do now, though I may have to give up peanut butter (honestly, I don’t really care). I’ll be motivated for the first time to fully explore what foods are produced in my area. And you know what’ll be fun? Travelling. When I go to Austin in July, it’ll be exciting, because there will be different local foods there.

There are a few things I can’t give up. Coffee—it’ll be locally-roasted, but I have to have it. Spices and salt—but these are dry goods used in small quantities, and I don’t feel too badly about their transport. The same would probably go for things like leavening. The idea is not to suffer deprivation, but to investigate and enjoy what is available, and to relearn some more traditional ways of food use and preservation.

And, if I’m at your house, of course I’ll eat anything you serve me.

As we are living this project, I expect there will be many follow-up posts about various details.

From the first sentence you just know

I finally had the opportunity to start Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. And-- here's the thing-- it's fantastic. If you haven't read it yet, go read it now. If you're not moved to tears within, oh, four pages, by sheer amazement at how good this book is, I'm not sure if you're someone I can know.

On eating and drinking in Tucson:

Like many other modern U.S. cities, it might as well be a space station where human sustenance is concerned. Virtually every unit of food consumed there moves into town in a refrigerated module from somewhere far away. Every ounce of the city's drinking, washing, and goldfish-bowl-filling water is pumped from a nonrenewable source-- a fossil aquifer that is dropping so fast, sometimes the ground crumbles. In a more recent development, some city water now arrives via a three-hundred-mile-long open canal across the desert from the Colorado River, which-- owing to our thirsts-- is a river that no longer reaches the ocean, but peters out in a sand flat near the Mexican border.

If it crosses your mind that water running through hundreds of miles of open ditch in a desert will evaporate and end up full of concentrated salts and muck, then let me just tell you, that kind of negative thinking will never get you elected to public office in the state of Arizona.

Farm Reads

At Daily Kos, two interesting farming-related diaries of this week:

OrangeClouds115 puts into simple, convincing terms the argument against allocating EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program) funds to help factory farms build manure lagoons.

And A. Siegel provides an introduction to the idea of vertical farming, ranging from rooftop gardens to diversified agricultural enterprises housed in skyscrapers.

Me, I'm excited, because no more waiting at the library for Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle-- a friend awaited me at my daughter's school this morning bearing a copy for me to borrow. Hooray!

Two Great Losses

Via Devilstower at Daily Kos, Alex the parrot, subject of a fascinating body of animal cognition and language research, has died. More about Alex's great work here and here. Memorial gifts may be made here in support of further parrot research.

[update]: A couple of links for cornfed and anyone else.
Pepperberg's 2002 book, The Alex Studies
Alex with Irene and Alan Alda on PBS' Scientific American Frontiers

Madeleine L'Engle also died last week. A real obituary will likely come later, as I owe her many thanks. For now, I'll just say that Mr. Jenkins One is one of the great characters of modern literature. And goodbye, to one of the most fearless persons we've had the privilege to know.

Kids' Book Thread

Like the regular book thread, this can serve as a long-term comment repository (linked at right sidebar) even after it's scrolled down; this one is for anybody who wants to talk kids' lit with us.

My daughter and I have both been very excited to discover the American Girl books. My much younger half-sister had been a fan of the series as a child, but I'd always been skeptical: they were, after all, associated with the sale of some very expensive dolls and other products, and I didn't have very high expectations for the quality of the books themselves. (There are eight individual series of six books; each series focuses on a fictional little girl representative of a particular time period and cultural group in American history.) My daughter, however, chose to check one out of the public library (it was the first book about Addy, a little girl who escapes from slavery and begins life in the North during the Civil War), and we were both instantly hooked.

The fact is, the Addy books are extremely well-written and emotionally gripping; and they're furthermore highly informative historically. For a six-year-old girl with little sense of American history and virtually no sense of our country's legacy of racial injustice, they've introduced a number of new topics of thinking and questioning: about war, about slavery, about prejudice, about class, about how culture changes over time. Kids this age have a keen sense of justice, and it's a perfect time to expand their concern for playground and at-home fairness into an awareness of imbalances in the wider world. At the same time, the stories communicate historical themes mainly through the daily life of a single girl, stirring kid empathy by focusing on familiar commonalities: feelings about family members, school experiences and social frustrations, games and meals.

We've finished the Addy stories and moved on to Felicity, a Revolutionary-War-era girl living in Williamsburg, Virginia. Because the themes in the Felicity books-- so far, anyway-- are not so urgently life-or-death, I don't find them quite as absorbing. In the first Addy book, Addy leaves three family members behind and risks her own life trying to escape north with her mother. In the first Felicity book, Felicity rescues a horse from an abusive owner. I guess that was pretty life-or-death for the horse.

Book Thread

Just for the heck of it (and to remind me to read as well as blog), I've added a new little sidebar item ("What I'm Reading"). The idea is, if you too are reading the same thing(s), or have recently read them, or want to read them... etc.... you can click the link and it will bring you to this book thread to discuss. (Of course, at the moment this post is at the top of the page, but it will ultimately scroll away.)

***
9/16/07
Sy Montgomery's The Good Good Pig

I've only just begun this, so no comment yet.

***

I've been reading Barack Obama's book for the past... almost two months, perhaps. I'm not sure why I'm finding it so difficult to get through, since it is extremely well-written for this type of political memoir/policy outline. Plus, he's funny. My favorite bit is still this, from the second chapter, where Obama describes meeting President Bush at a social gathering on the day of his swearing in to the U.S. Senate (just after hungrily stuffing his face with hors d'oeuvres) :

"Obama!" the President said, shaking my hand. "Come here and meet Laura. Laura, you remember Obama. We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family. And that wife of yours-- that's one impressive lady."

"We both got better than we deserve, Mr. President," I said, shaking the First Lady's hand and hoping that I'd wiped any crumbs off my face. The President turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the President's hand.

"Want some?" the President asked. "Good stuff. Keeps you from getting colds."

Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.

That's really what I like best about Obama: that quiet irreverence that sees the humanity in everybody regardless of position.

[Update]: And the way he talks about his wife is so sweet you'll have tears in your eyes. After reading the section on foreign policy, though... I'm finally starting to accept that he may not be my primary candidate. Damn.

[Update 2]: He wants to be president... but can he handle the goody bags?

It is left to Michelle to coordinate all the children's activities, which she does with a general's efficiency. When I can, I volunteer to help, which Michelle appreciates, although she is careful to limit my responsibilities. The day before Sasha's birthday party this past June, I was told to procure twenty balloons, enough cheese pizza to feed twenty kids, and ice. This seemed manageable, so when Michelle told me that she was going to get goody bags to hand out at the end of the party, I suggested that I do that as well. She laughed.

"You can't handle goody bags," she said. "Let me explain the goody bag thing. You have to go into the party store and choose the bags. Then you have to choose what to put in the bags, and what is in the boys' bags has to be different from what is in the girls' bags. You'd walk in there and wander around the aisles for an hour, and then your head would explode."

My dearly cherished hope is that my next book will be Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle... if only everybody else would hurry up with it at the public library.

Confounded by the Cul-de-Sac Kids

Her father pulled out pictures of two Korean girls.

Carly stood on tiptoes to see the pictures. "Will they get homesick?"

"Our home will soon become their home," her father said. "We want to make things easy for them. You and Abby can help us." He hugged Carly.

"We'll help them learn our ways, Daddy," Abby said.

Carly nodded. "And God's ways. We promise."

My 6-year-old laughed at me in bewilderment as I punctuated this passage in our library book with disbelieving groans; I kept having to put the book down on my lap. "I can't read this," I said. "I hate this book. If you want to get any more of these out of the library, you'll have to read them yourself."

"Why?" she said; but she was still laughing. She could even tell, herself, that there was something strange about the book. We'd already noticed that the first page of each chapter was graced with a small American flag icon. This had worried me even before Abby and Carly launched unexpectedly into their first prayer session in the bedroom closet.

The girls did their hand-over-hand secret code. Then they prayed.

"Dear Lord," Abby began. "We're getting new sisters."

"They might not know about you," Carly added.

Abby finished the prayer. "Please help us show Your love to them. In Jesus' name, Amen."

They turned off the flashlights and crawled out of the closet.

If you had a 1990s kid, perhaps you're familiar with Beverly Lewis's Cul-de-Sac Kids series. Not me. I was caught completely off guard. We'll help them learn our ways??-- They might not know about you, Jesus. I must be dreadfully naive; I never imagined this old-fashioned missionary colonialism was still alive and well in children's literature. Not only alive, but present in my public library. I'm opposed to censorship, but I almost feel there ought to have been a warning label.

"It's, like, a Christian book, isn't it," my daughter said with surprising cultural savvy. She still likes it. That's fine.

But it's a struggle to explain to a six-year-old why this particular juxtaposition of religiosity with the American flags, suburban utopian environment (the cul-de-sac), and clear sense of cultural superiority gives me such heebie-jeebies that I can barely read.

Some customer reviews for the Cul-de-sac Kids: "My son loves these books! He has read them over and over and really enjoys the characters. It is a blessing to not have to worry about what he is reading."

"I enjoyed reading this to my 5 year old. The content is safe for the minds of young children."

That's what you say, people. What does it mean for a book to be “safe” for a child?

Beverly Lewis, by the way, comes from a Mennonite background. Doesn't the overt nationalism of the series conflict with Mennonite beliefs about the priority of faith over national loyalty?

**

So I got curious about this world that was heretofore unknown to me: contemporary Christian children’s literature, where “Christian” seems, at least sometimes, to apply in the God-and-country sense. Assuming many of my readers are equally unfamiliar, what is out there?

I love this: the Extreme Teen Bible. Is there any title that could better exemplify the cultural collisions of American youth society?

The Extreme Teen Bible is about discovering who God is, what He's doing in the world, and what He promises for your future. So take the plunge into all the great stuff we've packed into this Bible to make your Bible time more extreme than ever before. […] So go ahead: dive in and discover extreme Truth for yourself.

Right after you finish snowboarding and eating that stuff so laced with citric acid that you've barely got any tastebuds left. Oh, wait, someone has already analyzed this.

In the purity ball department: The Princess and the Kiss. Blurb:

A loving king and queen present their daughter with a gift from God--her first kiss--to keep or to give away. The wise girl waits for the man who is worthy of her precious gift. Where is he and how will she ever find him? The surprising answer in this marvelous parable will touch the heart of parent and child alike.

Says the author, Jennie Bishop, founder of PurityWorks: “I asked God how I could teach my young daughters the value of their purity, how I could begin in their early years to stress the importance and beauty of saving themselves for marriage. This is God’s poignant answer.” (She adds, in the Christianbook.com interview: “It's really important that parents speak to those issues intentionally, so our kids know what we approve of, what God approves of, and how they can take steps to keep themselves clean … and why that’s so important.”)

Clean??

One reader review for The Princess and the Kiss:

bought this book to read to our two daughters (aged 5 and 7) and they loved the story and sighed when it ended that first time we read it. But their eyes widened when I said, "Do you know that YOU have a kiss, too?" They were so excited and we explained that someday when each girl was ready, Daddy and Mommy would take her out for a special dinner and give her her own "kiss," which would probably be in the form of a necklace. "You can wear that necklace until you're married and then give it to your new husband on your wedding day," we told them

And then there's His Little Princess:

Cinderella is a great story, but after the last page is turned, little girls can't look forward to the tale coming true when they grow up. It's just "for pretend." Now girls ages four to nine can unveil the reality of their royal calling! His Little Princess shows them that they are not pretend princesses--God is for real! When a grown-up sits down to read out loud these touching love letters, girls will come to understand and embrace how much they are truly loved and adored by God, the King of kings! Recommended for ages 4 to 9.

Oy. And I was going to try to teach my daughter that there's more to be being a girl than princess-hood. Instead, let's encourage that role for life.

Some publishers are actually looking to reprints from the past (here, 19^th century) to protect our children from the evils of the present-- like this “character-building” series from Grace and Truth Books, which “will be valued by any family who desire your children to be saturated in God's truth.”

And then there’s these. Don’t freak out, people, it’s a joke site. I think.

Please understand that I’ve been selective in this post. There are plenty of Christian books, too, that focus on the wonder of bugs (incidentally, God made them), or the value of compassion, or the uniqueness of the individual child. And there are sensible parent reviewers who apply their critical skills to more than doctrinal orthodoxy. Many mainstream Christian sites recommend a familiar list of books that most parents, of any spiritual bent, will consider “safe” and high-quality. I object, not to invocations of God, per se (though, frankly, I often find that startling), but to the strains of jingoism, anti-feminism, and Christian exceptionalism that can be found in some of this literature.

So do we progressives take a page out of the Christian parents’ book and start screening for “safe” stories before we read them to our kids? That’s a key question. For myself, no matter how much The Cul-de-Sac Kids make me squirm, I’m unwilling to forbid them to my daughter. But I’m not going to hide my discomfort, either.

Anyhow, she thinks it’s funny when I screech and wave my hands around while reading.